Bodily Resurrection in the Qurʾān and Syriac Anti-Tritheist Debate
When considering the content and polemical strategies of certain passages in the Qurʾān, the history of the short-lived Tritheist movement merits further analysis. This Miaphysite Christian faction was accused of confessing a triple Godhead and denying a physical resurrection. In the half century prior to the emergence of the Qurʾān, lively debates took place among Miaphysite Christians in Egypt, Syria-Palestine, and Arabia over Tritheism. Syriacspeaking Arab Christian leaders accused the Tritheists of polytheism for denying God’s unity and of pagan unbelief for rejecting the resurrection of the original human body. This collection of anti-Tritheist literature makes critiques of positions not unlike several passages in the Qurʾān, as both claim to be directed at polytheists and unbelievers, and both assume knowledge of biblical material and Syriac-speaking Christian texts. Biblically and theologically based critiques in the Qurʾān appear to show familiarity with anti-Tritheist polemics. This article makes the case that particular verses in the Qurʾān reflect knowledge of Miaphysite anti-Tritheist critiques of Tritheist positions on God and the resurrection, that certain passages were modeled after the polemical reduction of opponents’ positions found in anti-Tritheist literature, and that the content and method of anti-Tritheist literature was repurposed for alternative polemical uses. These features include anti-Tritheist claims that Tritheists were unbelievers, that they divided God’s unity, that they were pagans and polytheists, and that they denied the bodily resurrection. The Qurʾān’s parallels with anti-Tritheist content and rhetorical method in certain cases suggests its production was part of the wider discussions taking place in the Middle East at the turn of the seventh century.
القرآن: ما بعد أبي زيد وما قبل المصحف
هذا البحث القصير يستكمل عمل نصر حامد أبو زيد ويناقش موضوع التطابق بين قرآن”المصحف“ وقرآن ”اللوح المحفوظ.“ ويجد الدكتور علي مبروك في التراث ً السلمي نفسه ما ينفي ذلك التطابق المفترض، بل وأن ”الشرط النساني“ لعب دورا ً في إعطاء قرآن .ً
ً مفتوحا
يترك القرآن خطاباالمصحف ّ الشكل الذي استقر ّ عليه بعد وفاة النبي ّ محمد. ويستشهد ّ هاما تحليله بأقوال الصحابة في أمر الختلف بين مصاحفهم على مستوى السور واليات ً ّ النبي أراد أن والكلمات. ّ ويشير البحث أن عدم وجود ّ التطابق الراهن قد يعني أن ّ محمدا .
The Problematic of Prophecy: 2015 IQSA Presidential Address
When Muḥammad began to gain followers in Mecca, the leaders of the town sent trusted emissaries to the Jews of Yathrib/Medina to ask their opinion about whether or not Muḥammad was a true prophet. Al-Nadhr b. al-Ḥārith and ʿUqbah b. Abī Muʿayṭ traveled the 200 or so miles to Medina. When they got there, they were instructed by the Jewish leadership, “Ask Muhammad three questions. If he can answer them, he is a true prophet, but if not, then he is an imposter.”1
Afterward: The Academic Study of the Qur’an—Achievements, Challenges, and Prospects
Qurʾānic Studies is a broad feld that includes many categories and subtopics, including grammar, lexicon, rhetoric, theology, law, textual history, textual variants, the history of interpretation, and many others, any one of which is, or has the potential to be, large and complex. The investigation of these felds is not new but goes back to the early Islamic centuries. As the Islamic societies matured and spread, so did the scholarly genres that grew up around the Qurʾān, including tafsīr, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ, grammatical treatises, rhetorical manuals, and so on. Such works were penned in all corners of the Islamic world, primarily in Arabic, but also in other Islamic languages. Translations and primers were written in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, and other languages in order to facilitate comprehension of the Qurʾān on the part of Muslims who were not native speakers of Arabic. Study of the Qurʾān was also taken up by non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians in the Islamic world, and Jews and Christians in Western Europe. If the immediate motive for this interest was often polemical—the urge to counter Muslim claims to exclusive or superior access to the will of God—the result was an increase in general knowledge of Islamic doctrine and of Islam’s sacred text. The Qurʾān was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, retranslated in the seventeenth century, and subsequently translated into many of the modern European languages. In a sense, then, Qurʾānic Studies has been a large, international project for centuries. It has involved Muslims, Christians, Jews, adherents of other religions, and adherents of no religion. And it will continue to do so.
Bukhārī’s Kitāb Tafsīr al-Qurʾān
The celebrated Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) includes a long book of qurʾānic commentary. It is unusual in the Ṣaḥīḥ as a whole in relying heavily on reports from Companions: 72 percent of all the unique reports given full isnāds in the book, as opposed to only about 9 percent of all reports in the whole Ṣaḥīḥ. It is also unusual in the density of comment from later authorities (without isnāds) and in the number of comments from Bukhārī himself. Bukhārī accepts without demur that the Qurʾān includes loan words. In comparison with other commentaries on the Qurʾān such as those of ʿAbd al-Razzāq before him and al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Abī Ḥātim after, Bukhārī’s evidently plays down disagreement over the interpretation of words, legal applications, and textual variants. In comparison with the commentaries of al-Tirmidhī and al-Nasāʾī, Bukhārī’s includes very many comments from philologists. Bukhārī’s commentary is valuable for making out the larger history of Qurʾān commentary inasmuch as it testifes to the development of genre expectations in the mid-ninth century CE. It shows that the synthesis of ḥadīth and adab approaches was already under way, as well as other developments previously remarked in commentaries of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
“Nothing but Time Destroys Us”: The Deniers of Resurrection in the Qurʾān
In this posthumously published paper, Patricia Crone (d. 2015) examines a corpus of verses in the Qurʾān in which the mushrikūn, the supposedly pagan opponents of the qurʾānic prophet, are portrayed as objecting to the doctrine of the resurrection, one of the central tenets of the Qurʾān. In contrast to the traditional understanding of the mushrikūn as idolaters ignorant of monotheism, the evidence of the Qurʾān itself suggests that the mushrikūn were familiar with the concepts of judgment and resurrection but were either skeptical about them or denied them outright. The Qurʾān attributes statementsto them that indicate that the resurrectionwas an ancestral doctrine they had come to reject, not a new teaching. Not only do the mushrikūn appear to have been directly familiar with monotheistic concepts, but the Qurʾān attributes statements to them that seem to refect biblical phraseology. The author concludes that the most radical deniers may have represented a strain of eternalism or rationalism current in the late antique world in which the Qurʾān was revealed.
Did Ḥafṣah Edit the Qurʾān? A Response with Notes on the Codices of the Prophet’s Wives
This article revisits, assesses, and critiques the recent claim made by Ruqayya Khan that Ḥafṣah bt. ʿUmar, a wife of the Prophet Muḥammad, played a significant editorial role in the early establishment of the text of the Qurʾān but that her prominent editorial role in this enterprise has been suppressed by androcentric scholarship. In the course of our critique, we also attempt to offer insight into what role the Qurʾān codices owned by the Prophet’s wives played in early Muslim narratives of the ʿUthmānic codex, as well as how modern historical-critical and feminist readings of the early source material can, and must, mutually inform one another.
Form Criticism or a Rolling Corpus: The Methodology of John Wansbrough through the Lens of Biblical Studies
John Wansbrough’s scholarship on the Qurʾān has had a significant impact on Qurʾānic Studies over the last forty years. His ideas continue to stimulate research into historical and literary dimensions of the Qurʾān, even though assessments vary greatly regarding the plausibility of some of his major ideas, and his subtle arguments can be difficult to follow. This essay clarifies and evaluates Wansbrough’s thinking about the composition of the Qurʾān by elucidating the models from Biblical Studies that he appropriated. Detailed treatment is given to biblical form criticism and Wansbrough’s application of this method to the qurʾānic accounts of the prophet Shuʿayb. It is suggested that Wansbrough’s form-critical research yielded positive insights into the Qurʾān, but also left certain questions unanswered. It is then proposed that another model taken from Biblical Studies, the idea of a “rolling corpus” as developed in research on the book of Jeremiah, can sharpen and refine Wansbrough’s conclusions.
he Current State of Qurʾānic Studies: Commentary on a Roundtable Discussion
This paper is based on a roundtable discussion held at the 2015 IQSA Annual Meeting about the current state of the field of Qurʾānic Studies and its future, gathering together specialists in different areas from within the academic field of Qurʾānic Studies, as well as from outside it. The panelists were Kecia Ali (Boston University), Herbert Berg (University of North Carolina at Wilmington), Joseph Lumbard (American University in Sharjah), Nicolai Sinai (Oxford University), Devin Stewart (Emory University), and ShawkatToorawa (Cornell University, nowYale University); Farid Esack (University of Johannesburg) presided. The discussion is here summarized and analyzed by Karen Bauer (the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London). The aim in writing up this discussion is to present a coherent summary and analysis of its major points, so that specialists and nonspecialists alike may get a clearer picture of recent trends and changes in the field, as well as of the challenges facing scholars now and in the future
Response To Reuven Firestone’s 2015 IQSA Presidential Address
In his presidential keynote, Reuven Firestone has identified multiple features of the problem of prophecy in Islam. He informs us about the ways in which Muḥammad’s prophecy was first expected to occur according to reports from some Arabian Jews and how certain features of Muḥammad’s prophecy were even noted in Jewish sources. At the same time, he is also cautious and wonders out loud whether these episodes of Jewish notices of Muḥammad’s prophecy “could have occurred as depicted or whether something like them happened at all.” It is healthy to foster such skepticism. Skepticism allows the historian to explore other possibilities and explanations as to what happened in order to track how these predictions about Muḥammad’s prophecy played out, both at the time of their purported occurrence and when these reports were received among Muslim communities and other faith traditions over time
Editors’ Introduction: The Qurʾān Between Bible and Tafsīr
JIQSA is being launched at a crucial time for the growth and development of Qurʾānic Studies as a scholarly field. While there has been a surge of advances in just the last fifteen years, the field at times appears incoherent, seeming to lack a clear disciplinary identity. As greater numbers of scholars devote their efforts to the study of the Qurʾān, there is a natural diversification of research aims and methods, stimulating attempts to define Qurʾānic Studies “proper”—to distinguish those aims and methods that are central to the field from those that are peripheral, and determine how (and whether) the center and peripheries are meaningfully related. At the forefront of this drive currently are two major questions aimed at situating Qurʾānic Studies as an emergent field in its own right vis-à-vis those disciplines with which it has been linked historically:
Remembrance: Andrew Rippin (1950-2016)
On Tuesday, November 29, 2016, Andrew Rippin passed away at his home in Victoria, British Columbia.1 Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria since 2013—where he was formerly Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities—Andrew (or Andy as he was known to some) was an esteemed colleague, revered mentor, and scholarly inspiration to many members of the IQSA community. Entering the fields of Qurʾānic and Islamic Studies in the 1980s, Andrew was an astonishingly prolific scholar, helping to shape these fields for almost four decades.2 He was author or editor of two dozen well-known textbooks, anthologies, and thematic volumes; some eighty journal articles and book chapters; and literally hundreds of encyclopedia entries and reviews. For scholars of the Qurʾān, Andrew was perhaps best known for his profound impact on the study of tafsīr in particular. His numerous surveys and introductory works allow the aspiring student of the Qurʾān and its interpretation to both grasp the immensity of the field and appreciate its transformation over the decades since he published his earliest attempt to take stock of the state of the field some thirty-five years ago.3
